


The House that Wasn't Haunted

by SMJB



Category: Original Work
Genre: Creepypasta, Gen, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-03
Updated: 2019-12-03
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:55:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21585721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SMJB/pseuds/SMJB
Summary: An ESP researcher investigates a haunted house.
Kudos: 3





	The House that Wasn't Haunted

I first saw Linda Turner the day she checked into my mothers’ boarding house. She was, honestly, a rather plain looking woman--roughly 5’5” I’d say, red hair going prematurely grey, minimal makeup, and a professorial tweed jacket I’d soon learn she never left the house without.

“...never heard of that university, professor,” Mom 2 was saying as I entered the kitchen to grab a soda (well, probably; it was several years ago, so I trust you’ll forgive me for filling in the less important forgotten details). She was looking over Turner’s references.

“Nor should you have; it’s run by kooks and hippies, studying mainly pseudoscience,” Turner said jovially.

“And what do you study there, again?” Mom 1 asked. (And yes, they _hate_ that I call them Mom 1 and Mom 2.)

Turner grinned self-deprecatingly. “ESP.”

Suddenly I was interested, and decided to stick around to hear the rest of the story.

“What exactly are you in town for?” Mom 2 asked.

“I’m investigating that supposedly haunted house you’ve got across the street,” Turner explained.

“I...fail to see the connection,” Mom 2 said.

“The explanation’s a bit involved, I’m afraid,” Turner said apologetically.

From there the conversation turned to boring financial stuff and in the end my parents told her they’d check her references and get back to you. They must have checked out, because she moved in next week and immediately began asking around about the abandoned building across the street.

“What’s your interest in the place, anyway?” I asked her, a couple weeks into her stay.

“Do you know why people don’t go there?” she asked.

“Didn’t there used to be a family that lived there and then the father went crazy and murdered the wife and daughter? They say their ghosts still walk the halls.”

Turner snorted. “That’s the story Mrs. Johnson told me. Ms. Davis says it used to be an asylum where they experimented on the inmates before there was a gas leak and everyone died. Mr. Riker says it’s built on an indian burial ground. Mr. Julian says there’s nothing supernatural going on, you just shouldn’t go there because it’s horribly dilapidated and you’ll probably die of tetanus. Mr. James says it’s a crack house and if you go in ‘the gangs’ will kill you. _Which_ gangs, I have no idea, mind you; this neighborhood doesn’t exactly strike me as being high risk. Your little brother says it’s where the boogeyman lives. The other day I managed to get in contact with a team of ghost hunters who were once asked to investigate the house, and asked them why they declined. They claimed there was no evidence for any of the stories about that place and it wasn’t worth their time.”

“So, it’s not haunted?” I asked.

“I didn’t say that,” Turner said. “Does that sound like normal ghost hunter behavior to you? Fact-checking? Most of them are quacks. Indeed it wasn’t for this group--and they couldn’t tell me why they’d made the exception. I think I can rule out Mr. James’ theory of it being a crackhouse right here and now: I’ve had a camera trained on it for more than a week, and no one has entered or left in that time. You’re a teenager; tell me, do you remember any of your shithead friends daring anyone to spend a night in the haunted house, as Hollywood would have me believe is your cohort’s wont?”

“No,” I said.

“Didn’t think so,” she said with a smug little smile. “The thing about all these stories is that they’re scattershot. A little _too_ scattershot, if you ask me. That’s what attracted me here in the first place. And the reason for it is simple: they don’t spawn from a common source. They’re made up, yes, but it’s more than that. My hypothesis is simple, actually; people aren’t afraid of the house because of the stories about it; they’re afraid of the house, and make up the stories to explain why.”

“So...what? We’re just a bunch of superstitious ninnies?” The question wasn’t hostile.

“Not at all. Maybe I should explain the connection to ESP.”

“Go on,” I encouraged.

“I have a hypothesis that ESP is far more common that people think--that even people who have it wouldn’t recognize it. It started with a realization: there’s no reason to believe that the ESP phenomenon is isolated to the parts of the brain responsible for translating sensory information. Why would it be when, by definition, you’re not using the organs those parts of the brain are attached to? And if happening by chance to manifest in the visual or auditory cortex is the only reason it’s interpreted as visions or hearing things, how does it manifest elsewhere?

“The only thing I can think is that, if knowledge just appeared in your brain absent of apparent input, you’d just know things. But of course, you’d want to know why you know it, and having no answer, you’d come up with something that seems plausible. It’s intuition, or a memory, or something someone said. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. After all, all the reports of the usual sorts of ESP I’ve heard--inexplicable sights, sounds, smells, what have you--have struck me as rather...well, useless. Not the sort of thing that would be selected for by evolution, and whatever else ESP is, it must be something that evolved in our species. If that phenomenon was the misfiring of a deeper, subtler phenomenon, however...now _that_ made sense.

“And that’s what’s happening here, I think. Something in that house is...radiating, for lack of a better word... _something_ that makes us not want to go there, and we make up stories about it to explain why.”

“Like, a force field of spookiness?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Perhaps.”

I saw her in the boarding house’s common area a while later, looking at some pictures and frowning.

“What’s up, doc?” I asked.

She gestured at the pictures. “I set up trail cams around the house, to make sure no one was entering it from any other angle. They’re motion capture, and… well, look at it.”

I looked at the pictures. “They just look like black and white pictures of the house.”

“Remember how I said they were motion activated?”

“Yeah?”

She gestured again. “You see anything in those pictures that could be moving?”

I looked again and...well, one of the cameras had a tree in its view, so maybe its branches were swaying, but that didn’t explain the pictures taken by the other cameras, which were pretty tightly focused on the house’s windows and doors. “Not really,” I said.

“Exactly,” she said.

“Maybe the cameras are broken?”

“Maybe,” she said doubtfully. “I’ve ordered some new ones, just in case.”

A few days later, she’d collected the pictures from the new camera and they were acting up just like the old ones.

“Got any theories, doc?” I asked.

“I have a...an _idea_ ; I don’t even want to call it a hypothesis,” she said.

“Lay it on me,” I said.

“Maybe there’s something in the pictures and we just can’t see it.”

“Like it’s invisible?”

“Like our brains _refuse_ to see it,” she said.

“Why would our ESP evolve to do that? You’d think we’d want to see the dangerous thing,” I pointed out.

“It wouldn’t. We would. But…” she shook her head. “A colony of eusocial insects is called a ‘superorganism’ because it displays many of the characteristics of an organism. Including the ability to get parasites. There are insects out there that have learned to hijack the chemical signals of the ant colony and have learned to live among them, where they are fed and protected by the colony. Sometimes their ability to control the ants is so strong that, mistaking the invader for their queen, they kill their actual queen.

“One of the potential consequences of my hypothesis about ESP is a Jung-esque collective unconsciousness rising out of a sort of subconscious psychic internet; if that ‘internet’ exists, it becomes conceivable that creatures have evolved to use it to ‘hack’ our brains.”

“Or that people could learn to do it,” I interjected.

“Yes, of course, but a _human_ would use this ability to enrich themselves, rise to the top of the social hierarchy, and acquire a harem; whatever _this_ is is using it to squat in a rundown, condemned building,” Turner pointed out.

“Good point,” I said.

She shook her head. “So much speculation upon speculation! Based on so little information! But there is one thing I learned since last we spoke.”

“What?”

“I’ve been digging into the archives of the local newspapers, for references to the alleged ‘hauntings’ across the street. Mentions aren’t all that common, as you might expect--but before twenty five years ago, they cease entirely. If my speculation about the nature of this ‘haunting’ is correct, that’s when the creature moved in.”

The next time I saw her, she looked more triumphant, and was typing furiously into one of those suitcase sized laptops we had back then.

“I’ve got an idea,” she explained when I asked. “If the problem is with our eyes, not the camera, just because we can’t see the creature doesn’t mean a computer won’t. I’m coding a program that will look at two pictures pixel by pixel, highlighting the ones that aren’t the same. There’s going to be a lot of noise to signal, of course, due to different lighting conditions and suchlike, but if I’m right, we ought to be able to see at least a vague outline of the creature.”

“Neat,” I said, and went about my business.

Later we were looking at a picture which now looked like grainy stills of security camera footage, except the grains were purple. But there were two big purple blobs on the stoop of the house.

“This is a composite of the first and second image,” Turner said. One of the blobs moved. “Second and third.” The blob that had disappeared reappeared while the blob that had remained disappeared. “First and third. Through this method of comparison, I’m able to determine which blobs are from which pictures, and…” she opened a new file, containing photos with one blob apiece.

“These...don’t look like anything,” I admitted.

“Yeah, I was at least hoping to get a rough idea of its bauplan--like whether or not it was humanoid--and I think the reason we didn’t is simple and stupid.”

“What?”

“Streetlights at both ends of the street. If this is a physical, flesh and blood creature, it casts shadows. Which, like the creature, would also be different from picture to picture.”

“Can we correct for that?” I asked.

“With multiple light sources? Not with my skill level,” she said.

“Well, does it ever come out during the day?”

“It hasn’t so far.”

I noticed a picture that was all purple at the bottom. “What’s that?”

“It’s _possible_ that the camera was knocked slightly off-kilter by something,” Turner said, not sounding like she believed it. “I sent an unmodified version to a colleague, just in case.

Just then, she got an email notification, she opened it, and said. “It’s the colleague. He says, ‘Why did you send me a completely black picture?’”

I looked at the original of the purple picture; it looked like the stoop of the haunted house to me. But then, I knew what it was _supposed_ to be a picture of. “So, not the camera, then?”

“Not the camera,” Turner confirmed, and grinned. “This gives me an idea.”

She began cropping and de-purpleifying the blobs. “Hope my colleague doesn’t mind a little arts and crafts project; I’m going to ask him to delete only the parts of the pictures he can see.”

Next time I saw her I asked her if that helped. “No; he was like ‘What pictures? These are just blank white MS paint files,’” she said.

“Bummer.”

“It was worth a shot,” she said. “Perhaps the next batch of pictures will shed some light on it.”

The next day, she looked furious. “My trail cams were all destroyed.”

“What?”

“They look like someone took a baseball bat to them. Or _something_ did.”

I went pale. “Doc, you should leave.”

“What?”

“Don’t you see? It’s onto you.”

“I’m not being scared off by some invisible bogey. If it’s onto me, I just have to change tactics. Besides, we have no proof it’s violent.”

“It _literally_ radiates terror.”

“Yes, to keep people away from its home,” she pointed out.

“Well, what do you intend to do?”

“Set up a motion capture camera facing the house. If it ever takes a picture of nothing, the creature has left and I can go in and explore.”

“That sounds extremely dangerous,” I protested.

“Perhaps,” she admitted, undeterred.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. Something was nagging me, on the edge of my brain. I saw the purple blob in the black and white photos, the creature leaving and returning, or being seen in the window of the house--

I sat bolt upright. Some of those pictures from the windows were taken between pictures of it leaving and it returning! _There was more than one of them!_

I ran to Turner’s room in my pajamas and barged in, which is a major no-no in the biz. “Doc!” I shouted. I looked around the dark, empty room. “Doc?” Her bathroom door was open and her stuff scattered around, which was normal. There was a cold breeze, which was not, however. I quickly located the source, an open window, and that’s when my blood turned to ice. For one thing, it was the middle of October; for another, well, in Turner’s position, would _you_ have opened the window facing the house?

All thoughts of Turner left my head, and that’s when I noticed the deep, _intuitive_ feeling I had that I didn’t want to be in this room right now. My thoughts turned, apropos of nothing, to my family, and how I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them. To all the "accidents" that could befall them in this old building.

The warning was clear. “I’m sorry, doc,” I whispered as I left, gently closing the door behind me.

My parents found Turner’s body the next day. She had apparently slit her wrists and stood over the bathroom sink until she’d passed out from blood loss. No mention was made of her computer or the pictures, and I didn’t ask.

From then on, that room was said to be haunted. I told myself that this was normal, that of course the rumor mill would be greased by such a dramatic “suicide”. This was somewhat less convincing after I heard the rumor that the ghost was of an electrician who was fried by a live wire.


End file.
